#SuzyPFW Passing The Fashion Batons: Who Are The Winners?

In the current game of fashion’s musical chairs, Lanvin had the grandest of settings. Under the chandeliers and glided pillars of two vast rooms in the Paris City Hall, designer Bouchra Jarrar unfolded her first collection for the house.

It seemed almost like laying out a trousseau for this marriage of a designer with feminist leanings to the fashion house of Jeanne Lanvin – one of the first, and few, women to make it in couture back at the beginning of the 20th century.

So the show focused on soft silks and satins, lace and crepe, but cut them in a masculine way – a blazer over a tailored striped robe worn over soft trousers, or the same idea of masculine/feminine striped trouser suit with a lingerie top revealed underneath. Most of these combinations were tactile – as in silk, chiffon and fluffy marabou feathers.

This ode to femininity was a surprise from Bouchra Jarrar, better known for her brand’s sleek tailoring.

“I have been exploring the paths of sensuality and intimacy – building clothes around the body, veiling and unveiling the silhouette – crossing borders between femininity and masculinity,” said the designer.

But hasn’t fashion been there before? This is a long story of which Bouchra Jarrar is writing another chapter. But, whereas Alber Elbaz, her predecessor at Lanvin’s design helm, always offered collections that eschewed themes and offered different styles for different folk, here was a new designer defining a single Lanvin look.

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The clothes seemed beautifully made, almost couture in their exquisite craftsmanship, but the show was also very safe. If there is still a shock from seeing bare bosoms and black underwear beneath a sheer lace and chiffon dress, no-one at the show reacted. Covering up rather than unveiling seems more of today’s fashion trend. If anything, an exploration of the current gender fusion would have seemed more contemporary.

But the designer also said that “the first season at Lanvin is an opening”. It will be interesting to see how she moves her style – and Lanvin – forward.

John Galliano has finally got his ducks in a row at Maison Margiela. Tailoring and sport, texture and colour, giant bags and eye-popping sandals melded together to make a powerful mash-up of Margiela’s make-do-and-mend with Galliano’s visual extravagance. Even the hair and make-up – with touches of vivid colour – and the digital headsets used as decoration, seemed to put the designer in the right position between the stylish and the extravagant.

The scene was a summer music festival – although that did not appear in the programme notes, surely these women walking purposefully down the runway were off on an intriguing path – perhaps scuba diving to match the pattern on their clothes.

The sense was of thrifty use of a small wardrobe, one that probably all fitted into the runway rucksack and then tied round the waist and flung over the hips – the shapes and colours melding like the garments. It all made for a good, clear show, not trying too hard to send a message – but with intriguing and consolidated clothes.

In this period of refurbishing old houses with fresh talent, Courrèges has swallowed up two interesting young designers.

Last season, Sébastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant were on the edge of the see-now-buy-now revolution. Their early show was of a handful of different clothing categories shown on a modern stage with digital views projected behind the models.

What a difference this season – the venue was that oh-so-familiar French mansion, all gilt and curlicues and acres of polished floor. Only the small mushroom stools were a reminder that this was a label that had launched fashion towards a moon landing back in the 1960s.

There were a lot of new millennium materials stretched tautly over the body as if this were a sportswear collection. These fabrics were interesting, even the first outfits that were back-to-the-mini-era. Others were more specifically sporty, as in stretch trousers and small, taut bomber jackets with sticker-style decoration.

Since André Courrèges himself was the first designer to wear sneakers in the 1960s, light fashion-years ahead of the trend, I would have envisaged sports shoes. Instead, the models teetered on high heels, adding to an out of place feeling when a frilly shirt was matched by with stretch workout trousers.

There was nothing wrong with these outfits that seemed quite dynamic, with heavy metal hand and finger decoration and the insertion of strong colours like yellow, orange and a cherry red for a sophisticated coat.

But at the heart of these nice, wardrobe-filling clothes is the problem of the Courrèges legacy. The forward thinking designer made a mark on fashion history so briefly. Can you go back to past futurism and make it applicable to now? There was no magic in this perfectly OK collection of sporty fashion for here and now.